Talk:Just Dance 2018/@comment-32966579-20171217131235/@comment-1465604-20171218200232
Since the cat's out of the bag, I can now reveal the minor secret I was told by an Ubisoft employee at Gamescom. I was told that Ubisoft were going to start cracking down on channels that post just the full routines without any "transformative" work and apparently they've finally kicked it into gear (I was wondering what took them so long). I was told that a lot of people just go on Youtube and watch the videos and dance to them instead of buying the games. Sales of Just Dance in Brazil have apparently gone down by over 50% as of late, and I doubt it's just franchise fatigue or a backlash due to lackluster song lists. Ubisoft are (or at least they think they are) losing several times more in sales than they gain from these videos. And I believe they are right. Also, there was something about how if Ubisoft didn't crack down on these videos, the record companies could go after Ubisoft. I'm assuming that's some convoluted contract thing Ubisoft had to agree to to license the songs. This is also probably why many channels are now starting to substitute the in-game music with covers. ArturVideoSong just posts the complete routines, without even playing the game. Is this good for those of us who have already bought the games and just want to quickly be able to access them on the go? Yes. Is this good for Ubisoft, who are losing probably hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions in sales due to people just going on Youtube instead of buying their games? No. I was told all of this after I tried to shoot the screen head-on at the Just Dance party at Meltdown Cologne, which is why all of my videos from that party are shot from the side. The Ubisoft employee told me that as long as it wasn't fully head on, didn't use the original music track but a live version (i.e. with crowd sounds, ambient sounds, etc.) and included at least some dancers on-screen, it would count as transformative enough nobody would have a problem with my videos. I agreed and she let me shoot the remaining "missing" full gameplay videos ("Kissing Strangers", "Blow Your Mind (Mwah)" and "Dharma"). If you look through ArthurVideoSong's non-struck videos, the ones that are transformative are all this there, like this one. Nobody would ever be able to use that video straight off Youtube to substitute for the real thing, so Ubisoft will leave it be. (I didn't reveal this 'til now in case there were some legal mumbo jumbo in the works I'd be interfering with by going public with something Ubisoft might not want to be made public 'til they made their move and I didn't want to get in the way of Ubisoft's work or anger them. The employee never told me to keep it a secret, but she told it to me in a private conversation, so I erred on the side of caution.)